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Ever Green! WHEN you have an inner
experience, there is a natural tendency in you to have it again, to repeat it,
and to repeat it, you go by the same way and in the same manner. When you sit
in meditation, for example, you withdraw yourself from outward contacts and enter
into a condition with which you have become familiar, which has pleased you and
which you consider sufficiently high and a commendable poise of consciousness.
Thus whenever you sit down for meditation, you forthwith get into your habitual
condition automatically, without any effort and you remain there as long as you
like. Evidently, the experience has become a matter of habit i.e. mechanical
and lifeless, but you do not perceive it, you have become so unconscious. That
means you do not progress any more, you have shut yourself, as it were, in a
closed box. If you continue, you may do so your whole life in that way, but you
will not have advanced a single step; on the contrary, you will have regressed
a good deal. The
great secret of progress – and also of permanent youthfulness – is to feel at
every moment that you are just beginning your life and your life experience.
Always you start afresh; even if you are on the same path and seem to be moving
in the same direction for the hundredth time, you must feel as if it was for
the first time that you undertook the journey, it was your maiden attempt
towards a new discovery. Forget all past ideas, notions, experiences that crowd
upon your mind; sweep away all the accumulated dust that has cumbered your
brain; make your consciousness as clean and clear as that of a newborn babe – all
straightened out, with none of the convolutions and wrinkles of an aged
cerebrum. Always you will come into contact with the world and things in all
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simplicity and spontaneity of a pure consciousness and always the world and
things will bring to you their unending wonder and beauty and truth. Whenever
you go inside and seek your poise, do not look for your old acquaintances, the
familiar experiences, do not carry upon your back the load of the past, but go
ahead, as if through a virgin tract, making quite new discoveries, and opening
unexpected vistas at each step. You can make an experiment even on your
physical body, i.e. take the physical consciousness too to share in your
adventure of ever new discovery. Thus you may, for example, forget your habit
of eating or even walking, truly forget and try to learn over again, even as
you did for the first time as a child. You have to acquire consciously a
capacity of the body that has become an almost unconscious reflex action. It is
a wonderful and exhilarating experience. Naturally you cannot repeat too often
or carry too far an experiment of this kind on the physical plane. But you can
freely deal with your inner life and consciousness. You can make your mind and
your vital a clean slate, as much as you like: not once in your life, but every
moment of your life. And then see how the world impinges upon your consciousness,
what fresh discoveries and awakenings come to you endlessly! You can always rid
yourself of the accustomed vibrations on the normal levels of your existence,
the physical, vital and mental; and even you can go beyond your psychic
formation and be the wide, the vast, the limitless, the Infinite itself, void
of all name and form. And then with that virgin consciousness drop straight
into the world of material life and form, into your body and bodily reactions.
The world will give itself up to you in its pristine purity, its original
beauty and truth, always luminous and glorious. This experience has to be the
normal mode of your living, not simply the culmination or acme of your being, a
fixed and stagnant status, even if considered the highest, the summum bonum.
That is how you can keep yourself and the world around you ever fresh and
young and new. The
preacher who speaks of the truth and delivers it to his hearers is usually
effective for the first time or for a first few occasions only, when he feels
the truth of his truth and is sincere while delivering. But as time wears on,
his truth too
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for it becomes stereotyped, a matter of mere habit. The experience is no longer
lived, but mechanically doled out. You are sincere only when the experience is
new and fresh and living, it should be made so every moment, otherwise it is
dead letter, letter that killeth. That
is the secret of spiritual life and even of normal life. To keep it ever green
you must know how to pour into it a continuous flow of new sap. Look upon
yourself, look upon the world always with fresh eyes – never burdened or
obscured by the scales that past experiences and acquisitions have collected. Unlearn
the past, always begin from the beginning as a beginner – every moment a fresh
impact, a new revelation, an unexpected opening. That is how life remains ever
young and ever progressive.
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